Vactrain
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A vactrain (or vacuum tube train) is a proposed design for very-
18th century
In 1799, George Medhurst of London conceived of and patented an atmospheric railway that could convey people or cargo through pressurized or evacuated tubes. The early atmospheric railways and pneumatic tube transport systems (such as the Dalkey Atmospheric Railway) relied on steam power for propulsion.
19th century
In 1888, Michel Verne, son of Jules Verne, imagined a submarine pneumatic tube transport system that could propel a passenger capsule at speeds up to 1,800 km/h (1,100 mph) under the Atlantic Ocean (a transatlantic tunnel) in a short story called "An Express of the Future".[2]
20th century
The vactrain proper was invented by Robert H. Goddard as a freshman at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States in 1904.[3] Goddard subsequently refined the idea in a 1906 short story called "The High-Speed Bet" which was summarized and published in a Scientific American editorial in 1909 called "The Limit of Rapid Transit". Esther, his wife, was granted a US patent for the vactrain in 1950, five years after his death.[4]
In 1909, Russian professor Boris Weinberg built the world's first model of his proposed version of the vactrain at Tomsk Polytechnic University.[5][6] He later published a vactrain concept in 1914 in the book Motion without friction (airless electric way).
In 1955, Polish science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem in a novel The Magellan Nebula wrote about intercontinental vactrain called "organowiec", which moved in a transparent tube at a speed higher than 1,666 km/h (1,035 mph). Later in April 1962, the vactrain appears in the story "Mercenary" by Mack Reynolds,[7] where he mentions Vacuum Tube Transport in passing.
During the 1970s, a leading vactrain advocate, Robert M. Salter of RAND Corporation, published a series of elaborate engineering articles.[8][9]
An interview with Robert Salter appeared in the
Trains were to require no couplers, each car being directly welded, bolted, or otherwise firmly connected to the next, the route calling for no more bending than the flexibility of steel could easily handle. At the end of the line, the train would be moved sideways into the end chamber of the return tube. The railway would have both an inner evacuated tube and an outer tunnel. At cruise depth, the space between would have enough water to float the vacuum tube, softening the ride.[citation needed]
A route through the
Salter pointed out how such a system would help reduce the environmental damage being done to the atmosphere by aviation and surface transportation. He called underground Very High Speed Transportation (tube shuttles) his nation's "logical next step". The plans were never taken to the next stage.[citation needed]
At the time these reports were published, national prestige was an issue as
Starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Swissmetro was proposed to leverage the invention of the experimental German Transrapid maglev train, and operate in large tunnels reduced to the pressure altitude of 21,000 m (68,000 ft) at which the Concorde SST was certified to fly.[citation needed]
In the 1980s, Frank P. Davidson, a founder and chairman of the Channel Tunnel project, and Japanese engineer Yoshihiro Kyotani tackled the transoceanic problems with a proposal to float a tube above the ocean floor, anchored with cables (a submerged floating tunnel). The transit tube would remain at least 300 m (1,000 ft) below the ocean surface to avoid water turbulence.[citation needed]
On November 18, 1991, Gerard K. O'Neill filed a patent application for a vactrain system. He called the company he wanted to form VSE International, for velocity, silence, and efficiency.[11] However, the concept itself he called Magnetic Flight. The vehicles, instead of running on a pair of tracks, would be elevated using electromagnetic force by a single track within a tube (permanent magnets in the track, with variable magnets on the vehicle), and propelled by electromagnetic forces through tunnels. He estimated the trains could reach speeds of up to 4,000 km/h (2,500 mph) – about five times faster than a jet airliner – if the air was evacuated from the tunnels.[12] To obtain such speeds, the vehicle would accelerate for the first half of the trip, and then decelerate for the second half of the trip. The acceleration was planned to be a maximum of about one-half of the force of gravity. O'Neill planned to build a network of stations connected by these tunnels, but he died two years before his first patent on it was granted.[11]
21st century
In 2001, James R. Powell – a co-inventor of superconducting maglev in the 1960s – began leading an investigation into the prospect of using a maglev vactrain for space launch, dubbed StarTram. Theoretically, this would incur two orders of magnitude less cost than current rockets. The StarTram proposal would have vehicles reach up to 14,300 to 31,500 km/h (8,900 to 19,600 mph) within a lengthy acceleration tunnel.[13]
ET3 claim to have achieved some work that resulted in a patent on "evacuated tube transport technology" which was granted in 2009.[14] They presented their idea in 2013 on public stage.[15]
In August 2013 Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, published the Hyperloop Alpha paper, proposing and examining a route running from the Los Angeles region to the San Francisco Bay Area, roughly following the Interstate 5 corridor.[16] The Hyperloop concept has been explicitly "open-sourced" by Musk and SpaceX, and others have been encouraged to take the ideas and further develop them.
To that end, a few companies have been formed, and several interdisciplinary student-led teams are working to advance the technology.[17] SpaceX built an approximately 1-mile-long (1.6 km) subscale track for its pod design competition at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California.[18]
See also
References
- ^ Joseph Giotta (Narrator), Powderhouse Productions (April 16, 2003). "Transatlantic Tunnel". Extreme Engineering. Discovery Channel. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011.
- ^ Verne, Michel. "An Express of the Future".
- ^ "The SciFi Story Robert H. Goddard Published 100 Years Ago". gizmodo.com.
- ^ "Vacuum tube transportation system". patents.google.com.
- ^ Weinberg, Boris. "Движение без трения. pre-α" [Motion without friction. pre-α] (in Russian). Retrieved November 24, 2015.
- ^ Weinberg, Boris (1917). "Five Hundred Miles an Hour". Popular Science Monthly. 90: 705–708.
- ^ Reynolds, Mack (April 1962). "Mercenary". Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Retrieved January 19, 2015.
- ^ Salter, Robert M. (August 1972), The Very High Speed Transit System, RAND Corporation, retrieved September 28, 2011
- ^ Salter, Robert M. (February 1978), Trans-Planetary Subway Systems: A Burgeoning Capability, RAND Corporation, retrieved September 28, 2011
- ^ Salter, Robert M. (1978), Trans-Planetary Subway Systems = A Burgeoning Capability, RAND Corporation, retrieved May 9, 2021
- ^ .
- ^ Daniels, Lee A. (April 29, 1992). "Gerard K. O'Neill, Professor, 69; Led Studies on Physics and Space". The New York Times.
- ^ "StarTram2010". startram.com. Retrieved April 28, 2011.
- ^ "Why ET3? | Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies". US: ET3. 2013. Retrieved October 9, 2017.
- ^ Oster, Daryl (October 9, 2013). Speedy Travel in a Vacuum Tube. US. Retrieved October 9, 2017 – via Idea City.
- ^ "Hyperloop Alpha" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on January 1, 2020. Retrieved November 3, 2019.
- ^ Hawkins, Andrew J. (June 18, 2016). "Here are the Hyperloop pods competing in Elon Musk's big race later this year". The Verge. Retrieved October 19, 2016.
- ^ Etherington, Darrell (September 2, 2016). "Here's a first look at the SpaceX Hyperloop test track". TechCrunch.